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Outlook.com: Leveraging O365’s Geo-DNS for Outlook Accounts

If you’ve ever used Office 365, then you’ll be aware of how the Geo-DNS feature and protocol proxy can benefit users, when connecting to their mailboxes from different regions than where the tenant resides. I don’t want to rehash what’s already been written, so if you’re not familiar with Geo-DNS, I suggest perusing this blog post for more information on it.

O.k., so, what matters to this story is that my account in Outlook.com was once a [email protected] account that got split when Microsoft merged [email protected] into Office 365. I’ve lost the Office 365 account but the Live account stuck around – and I’m glad that it did because all of my purchases were associated with it.

So, that being said, the account (and, thus, the mailbox) has been around for a hot minute. I don’t know if this will work with new Outlook.com accounts but I can’t fathom any reason why it shouldn’t.

First, the problem.

The issue with Outlook.com is pretty straightforward. A DNS query from any server outside of North America will provide an group of IP addresses, like this:

All of these hops are wholly unnecessary. After all, if I look at a message header from a mail I received, I can see that my mailbox is in Helsinki (and, even though it’s an Outlook.com account, serviced in the same forests as Office 365):

HE1PR0802MB2537.eurprd08.prod.outlook.com

This, of course, also meant that I was landing on a Cafe in North America, being protocol proxied from North America to Helsinki, and then the response would traverse back the reverse path to me. As you can tell from the latency, it wasn’t a very fast response.

What was the resolution?

Since I’m using EWS in Evolution on Ubuntu 180.04LTS, I simply changed the server name from “outlook.com” to “outlook.office365.com”. This means that I leverage Geo-DNS and this will land my requests on front-end server within Europe, which would then protocol-proxy the request to my mailbox hosted (currently) in Helsinki.

I can’t promise that this will work for you but it’s definitely worth a shot; especially, to avoid network degredation, by not having your traffic routed through North America.

It’s not much, I’m aware, but it’s a small piece of help that I hope might benefit someone, some day.